Thread: Grammatica - A tool for Russian grammar analysis/lookup

Hello everyone!

My name is Vladyslav and I work at a start-up called Grammatica. We are currently developing a tool that would allow users to use any Russian text as learning material in order to help them improve their pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary.

Here are some of the key features of our application:

• Inserting stress marks for every word in any Russian text
• Looking up grammatical information such as case, gender, number for any word
• Looking up all the inflected form of any word
• Customizable highlighting based on particular grammatical characteristics
• In-line graphics allowing you to include basic translations above words inside your text (among other things)
• Automatics transliteration of English characters allowing you to type in Russian without a Russian keyboard.

To give people a better idea of the features and scope of our application, we created a short 90 second video 'tour' of our application on our website:

www.grammatica.eu

I would appreciate if members of the MasterRussian community could provide some feedback about the functionality of our application.

Some questions to consider:
-To what extent would Grammatica be useful for learning Russian at an advanced level?
-What features do you think would be particularly useful for someone who wants to master their knowledge of Russian?
-If you are a teacher, do you think Grammatica would help you explain/teach the more technical aspects of Russian grammar?


You can find a more detailed description of Grammatica's features on this page:

Grammatica | Features

I apologize in advance if this post sounds like an advertisement, it's genuinely not meant to be an advertisement. At this point we don't really even have a product to sell. The main reason for this post is to see what people think of our application. Our application is quite unique in the sense that it combines features found in many other commercial applications/online tools into one package. It would be interesting to see what an average student of Russian thinks about our application.

Thanks you for your time.

Vlad

Definitely sounds interesting, but the video is just audio for me in Firefox / Linux. Then again, the software is probably Windows-only as well anyway, right?

I would definitely be interested in such a product. You in need of any beta testers?

Yes, awesome is what I would rate such a software /website. I am particularly interested in the first 3 features of the tool:

• Inserting stress marks for every word in any Russian text
• Looking up grammatical information such as case, gender, number for any word
• Looking up all the inflected form of any word

However I have a concern is about the stress mark. How do you determine which word is stressed if the word is similarly spelled, for example замок, and other such words which have different meanings depending on how the word is stressed.

Apart from that I've always had problems with the grammatical information of words in more complex sentence constructions and thus the tool, if it really works, would be like a god sent.

Cheers and wishing you every success!

Did your software resolve logical connection between words? It would be great if the software can divide complicated sentence in to smaller ones. Is it a purpose of what I can see at 0:50-1:00 in your movie?

Thank you for the feedback!

Originally Posted by bitpicker

Definitely sounds interesting, but the video is just audio for me in Firefox / Linux. Then again, the software is probably Windows-only as well anyway, right?

Yes, the software runs only on Windows. We would be interested in porting it over to Linux but that would depend on demand and how mature moonlight is with regards to support for .Net 4. In the meantime you can check out our video on youtube (as I understand, vimeo has issues with Linux support): Explaining Grammatica... (Youtube).

Originally Posted by tohca

However I have a concern is about the stress mark. How do you determine which word is stressed if the word is similarly spelled, for example замок, and other such words which have different meanings depending on how the word is stressed.

Apart from that I've always had problems with the grammatical information of words in more complex sentence constructions and thus the tool, if it really works, would be like a god sent.

Cheers and wishing you every success!

Thank you for the support! Our stress mark 'engine' will be able to figure when the stress needs to be on a different part of the word depending on context. Our engine will analyze the surrounding words to sort out such 'collisions'. We will also have a list of 'exceptions' for cases such when the word "на" is used with a one syllable word.

Originally Posted by Demonic_Duck

I would definitely be interested in such a product. You in need of any beta testers?

Thank you for your interest in our application. We might have some sort of beta testing session closer to the release date, but we still need to think about this issue. I will contact you via PM if we decide to initiate a public beta testing program.

Originally Posted by CoffeeCup

Did your software resolve logical connection between words? It would be great if the software can divide complicated sentence in to smaller ones. Is it a purpose of what I can see at 0:50-1:00 in your movie?

While our software does build logical connections between words, this is done primarily to improve the accuracy of Grammatica. The highlighting feature that you mentioned is designed to allow people to focus on aspects of Russian grammar that they are having difficulty with. So you can have Grammatica highlight all other words with a case similar to the currently selected word. Thus giving you a better understanding of how a particular case (or any other grammatical characteristic) works.

Could you give me an example of what you mean by dividing complicated sentences into smaller parts? I just want to make sure that we avoid any confusion.

Originally Posted by grammatica

Yes, the software runs only on Windows. We would be interested in porting it over to Linux but that would depend on demand and how mature moonlight is with regards to support for .Net 4. In the meantime you can check out our video on youtube (as I understand, vimeo has issues with Linux support): Explaining Grammatica... (Youtube).

I think you mean Mono (moonlight is silverlight on Linux, not .NET). Mono causes severe allergies among Linux users and is just as prone to crashing as anything Windowsy, so I woldn't put any energy into that, if you ask me. Sensible coding, again, if you ask me, does not use proprietary technology at all.

Could you give me an example of what you mean by dividing complicated sentences into smaller parts? I just want to make sure that we avoid any confusion.

Зима. Крестьянин, торжествуя, на дровнях обновляет путь. --> Крестьянин обновляет путь.

Originally Posted by CoffeeCup

Зима. Крестьянин, торжествуя, на дровнях обновляет путь. --> Крестьянин обновляет путь.

Sorry, our application would not be to do that. Might be worth thinking about for version 2.

It looks good! I have seen a lot of "gadgets" in my time so I would have to try it out to be sure. Let me know if you want me to test it out.

Originally Posted by Sgt. Cold

It looks good! I have seen a lot of "gadgets" in my time so I would have to try it out to be sure. Let me know if you want me to test it out.

Of course. We should have trial version ready towards the end of January. Fee free to sign up our newsletter in the meantime. Hopefully our application will be a little better than the current gadgets/apps on the market.

Of course. We should have trial version ready towards the end of January. Fee free to sign up our newsletter in the meantime. Hopefully our application will be a little better than the current gadgets/apps on the market.

In the meantime, we'll be waiting patiently and keeping our fingers cross ...

Hi guys!

Sorry for the delay, but we encountered some last minute bugs that needed fixing, so we have delayed our release date from the end of January to the beginning of March.

Sorry about that!

Originally Posted by grammatica

Hi guys!

Sorry for the delay, but we encountered some last minute bugs that needed fixing, so we have delayed our release date from the end of January to the beginning of March.

Sorry about that!

Thanks for the update.

Scott

Yes thanks! We are still here......

Hi!

We've recently published some screenshots of Grammatica on our website:
Grammatica | Features

You can click on the screenshots to bring up a higher resolution image with additional comments. I would love to hear your opinion about them!

Some questions to consider:
-Does the interface seem intuitive?
-Do you understand how the various features work (highlighting, grammar analysis etc)?
-We are going to include a few starter texts to help people get acquainted with Grammatica, perhaps you might have some suggestions for some interesting texts that would appeal to learners of Russian?

You can also read our first newsletter here:
http://www.grammatica.eu/content/news/1-3-2011-en.html (in English)
http://www.grammatica.eu/content/news/1-3-2011-ru.html (in Russian)

If you're interested, you can also join our facebook group:
Grammatica | Facebook

We are planning to give our FB's fans a small present when we release our application in a few weeks.

As always, feel free to contact me or Jacob (my boss) via email.

Thanks!

Hi,

We've released version 1.5 in December that features a lot of improvements over our initial release:
* Faster analysis
* Support for lots of new Russian words
* Improved translations
* Stability and usability fixes

We've also lowered the price to $59 for the professional version and introduced a standard version for $29.

You can find out more on our website: www.grammatica.eu.

I'll be happy to answer any of your questions.

Regards,

Vlad

Странно, что платная программа была допущена для дискуссии и практически для рекламы на нашем форуме. Не думаю, что я могла это оставить без внимания. Мне кажется, что я спрашивала Админа об этом. И вроде бы он мне ответил, что для наших форумчан программа будет бесплатной. Боюсь утверждать, помню смутно, хотя, чем больше думаю об этом, тем лучше вспоминаю, что был такой разговор. Не знаю, можно ли найти старую переписку.